Are your readers a community?

I asked my Twitter followers what they think of substituting the word “community” for “readers” and I’m getting lots of good responses, many of them negative.

Either I didn’t know “community” had much of a stigma, or I spent too long working with “community” newspapers to notice. Back then, it seemed like a great linguistic way to hold a grizzled editor or publisher’s hand as they made the leap from thinking of the people in town as their “readers” to collaborating with them as “the former audience” as Dan Gillmor called them.

5 Replies to “Are your readers a community?”

Community implies a kind of unanimity that I don’t think you can assume from readers of news. Daily Kos has a community. If we define that word broadly enough to encompass a group who shares only its interest in news (eg readers of a mainstream news site) it has become vague to the point of uselessness.

Community implies people are talking to each other, without relying on a single node (me or my news org) to mediate, along with a shared sense of identity based on who’s in, and possibly who’s out. That’s a harder thing to achieve than I suspect most people realize. It’s certainly not something I’ve managed to build on any of my sites, except possibly at fleeting moments on DalianDalian.

I’ve been pondering this. I think the point about readers not implying community is a good one — I completely agree.

But I don’t think community means that people are necessarily talking with each other. For example, you can have a sense of community through a shared experience like reading a newspaper, but this a lower threshold for “community.”

One of the great advantage of the Web is the lower barrier to not only enhanced shared experiences, but interactive ones — be they face to face on Seesmic or comments on a blog.

Also, there’s no one way to form a community. A community could form on it’s own or as a result of a community building efforts.

Getting back to the original question, it’s hard to pin down an answer. So the question really is, “How do you define community?”

Is it just someone who visits a site once — or even regularly — or is engaged through commenting, submitting photos, etc.? Something in between?